Setting UTF-8 as the Default Charset in .htaccess

Using .htaccess, you can set UTF-8 as the default character encoding for your website. This ensures that all content served by your server uses the UTF-8 encoding, which is a modern standard and supports a wide range of characters and languages.

For the broader AddDefaultCharset reference, see AddDefaultCharset in .htaccess: Ensuring File Encoding, How to Use AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 in .htaccess, and How to Use AddDefaultCharset in Apache.

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Check if the Content-Type header includes charset=UTF-8.

Using Browser Developer Tools:

1. Open your website in a browser.
2. Inspect the page (Right-click > Inspect).
3. Go to the Network tab, reload the page, and select the document.
4. Check the Headers section for Content-Type.

Expected output:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Using Curl:

Run the following command:

curl -I http://yourdomain.com

Expected output:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

• Open your website and ensure special characters (e.g., diacritics, emojis) display correctly.
• Include a sample text with special characters to test.

For additional safety, explicitly declare the charset in your HTML files using the <meta> tag:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

This ensures the browser uses UTF-8 encoding even if the server headers are not received correctly.

# Set the default charset to UTF-8

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8



# Enable additional headers for security (optional)

<IfModule mod_headers.c>

    Header set Content-Type "text/html; charset=UTF-8"

</IfModule>

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');